In hospitals software systems are used for the documentation of patient-related information. This information includes among other things measurements from medical appliances which monitor and/or affect the state of the patient. In general the medical appliances have interfaces in order to make data, such as e.g. measured or set values and alarm data, electronically available.
Patient documentation systems make use of different software modules in order to receive and further process the data from the medical appliances, for example displaying and/or storing said data. For this purpose the medical appliances are connected to computers so-called interface PCs—which take on the function of an interface between the individual medical appliances on the one hand and the systems processing the data on the other hand.
There are a large number of different medical appliances with different communication protocols which require different interface settings. These are for example patient monitoring, breathing or anesthesia appliances such as e.g. IntelliVue MP90 made by Philips Medical Systems, Solar 8000 made by GE Healthcare, Infinity Delta made by Dräger/Siemens, AS/3 made by Datex, Evita2 made by Dräger, Servo 300 made by Maquet, Zeus made by Dräger and Aestiva/5 made by Datex.
The connection of a new medical appliance to an interface PC or changing one medical appliance for another medical appliance is generally associated with a series of settings both on the medical appliance and on the interface PC which must generally be made by the medical staff.
First of all the driver software belonging to a medical appliance must be chosen. However, this is not always immediately available or known for the respective medical appliance. Moreover, a medical appliance can allow a number of different communication parameters. The communication parameters include e.g. the data transmission rate (baud rate), the number of data bits, the parity, the number of start and stop bits and the type of flow control used. Also, the permissible communication parameters are not always known, and so the latter must first of all be read off from the medical appliance. For this, if applicable systems menus must be opened which can be protected by requiring a password. Therefore, the inputting of the communication parameters is often found by the staff members involved to be tiresome, or is even forgotten, and moreover it is prone to error.
If the aforementioned settings are not made or are made erroneously, no data link to the medical appliance can be established, and so data, such as e.g. values measured with the measuring appliance or set on the measuring appliance, are lost.